• An Unexpected Experiment with Linux

    My work laptop had a failure over the weekend. It wouldn't boot up into Windows, and after some fearful research, I discovered that the Windows registry seemed corrupted . So there I was, with an unusable laptop. Or was…

  • Tetris Game Shaping Up

    Tonight, I reached a good point with my coding of Tetris: I managed to get falling pieces that I could move horizontally. Some big things are missing: boundary detection, the creation of the "mound" (the pieces that…

  • An Approach for Tetris Shapes in C++

    I've been noodling with a Win32 version of Tetris , the ubiquitous "shape placing" game. I'm working in C++ using the Simple Directmedia Layer for my graphics. One of the interesting things in working out the game is…

  • Professional Attention

    When you work as a computer professional, you will inevitably hear your share of corporate phrases and workplace lingo. You know what I'm talking about. Things like "let's take that off-line", and "let's drill down"…

  • Don't Underestimate Hello World

    Kernighan and Ritchie made things look so easy with their innocent "Hello, World" program . Yes, it's just a few lines, and the command to invoke the compiler is so easy ("cc hello.c"). But don't go underestimating…

  • PickNumber Game

    In the beginning of December (last year), I wrote another small game. It's even simpler than the Concentrate game, but instead of JavaScript, it's in Flex . You can play the small game here:

  • Concentration Game Finished

    I finished that concentration game. You can play it at:

  • Fixing My Portable DVD's H03 Error

    A few days ago our portable DVD player (a Panasonic DVD-LS 82 ) began producing an "Error H03" message to the screen whenever we gave it a known working DVD. Normally, a malfunction like this is a chance for me to dip…

  • Writing a Concentration Game

    I'm writing a small JavaScript program to implement the simple game of "Concentrate". A few weeks ago, I borrowed JavaScript: The Good Parts , by Douglas Crockford . It's a terrific little book on what's good about…

  • Creating RSS Feeds (Part 3 of 3)

    In the previous post , I showed how WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser can grab content from a website, and parse that content to produce the information required for an RSS feed. So how do I make a feed with all that?